Get Entangled With History's Longest Beard

Every now and again, you read something from history that’s almost too perfect to be true. Case in point: the longest beard in history belonged to a man by the name of Hans Langseth.

Langseth was born in Norway in 1846, but immigrated to the United States and ended up in Kensett, Iowa, where he spent much of his life as a farmer, husband, and father. He first started growing his whiskers at age 19 for a beard-growing competition and then, you could say, he just kept running.

Before his death in 1927, Langseth made a request to his children to cut off his beard after his open-casket funeral and save it. The children complied, and after many years, they donated it to the Smithsonian, where it’s now kept in storage. The exact length of the artifact is up for debate. Guinness and the Smithsonian say it’s 17 feet 6 inches, though a website from the family of Langseth claims they left a chunk of the beard with the man himself, and the total was really more like 18 feet 6 inches.

That site also claims that at one point, Langseth had decided to cut off his beard, but changed his mind in the process, accounting for some narrower portions. Because beard hair can only grow so long before it starts to die, Langseth basically dreadlocked the ends—matting and coiling it, and even rolling it around a corncob to carry it with him. A video believed by the family to be authentic, shows just how unwieldy the beard could be.

At one point, “King Whiskers” was part of a touring sideshow exhibition, but he eventually quit because people would yank at his accomplishment, believing it to be a farce. It wasn’t all bad though. Anthropologist Dr. David Hunt told the Smithsonian: "According to family members, he did like it when the Fat Lady washed his beard."

A prehistoric chunk of pigment found near an ancient lake in England may be one of the world's oldest crayons, Colossal reports. The small object made of red ochre was discovered during an archaeological excavation near Lake Flixton, a prehistoric lake that has since become a peat wetland but was once occupied by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. Though it’s hard to date the crayon itself, it was found in a layer of earth dating back to the 7th millennium BCE, according to a recent study by University of York archaeologists.

Measuring less than an inch long, the piece of pigment is sharpened at one end, and its shape indicates that it was modified by a person and used extensively as a tool, not shaped by nature. The piece "looks exactly like a crayon," study author Andy Needham of the University of York said in a press release.

University of York

The fine grooves and striations on the crayon suggest that it was used as a drawing tool, and indicate that it might have been rubbed against a granular surface (like a rock). Other research has found that ochre was collected and used widely by prehistoric hunter-gatherers like the ones who lived near Lake Flixton, bolstering the theory that it was used as a tool.

The researchers also found another, pebble-shaped fragment of red ochre at a nearby site, which was scraped so heavily that it became concave, indicating that it might have been used to extract the pigment as a red powder.

"The pebble and crayon were located in an area already rich in art," Needham said. "It is possible there could have been an artistic use for these objects, perhaps for coloring animal skins or for use in decorative artwork."

Twenty years after it was discovered in an African cave, one of the most important fossils in the quest to demystify human evolution is finally on display. As Smithsonian reports, Little Foot, an Australopithecus specimen dating back more than 3 million years, was revealed to the public this month at the Hominin Vault at the University of the Witwatersrand’s Evolutionary Studies Institute in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Paleontologist Ron Clarke discovered the first bone fragments from the fossil in 1994. The pieces came from the remains of a young female’s feet, hence the nickname. Clarke and his team spent years excavating Little Foot bit by bit from the Sterkfontein cave system in South Africa until the bones were fully removed in 2012. The shattered remains had been embedded in a concrete-like material called breccia, making them incredibly tricky to recover. But the sum of the parts is monumental: Little Foot is the most complete Austrolopithecus fossil known to science.

The hominid genus Austrolopithecus played an essential early role in the chain of human evolution. Lucy, another famous hominid fossil, is a member of the same genus, but while Lucy is only 40 percent complete, Little Foot retains 90 percent of her skeleton, including her head. It’s also possible that Little Foot surpasses Lucy in age. Most paleontologists agree that Lucy lived about 3.2 million years ago, while one analysis places Little Foot’s age at 3.67 million years.

Austrolopithecus is believed to have spawned Homo, the genus that would eventually contain our species. The discovery of Lucy and other fossils have led scientists to designate East Africa as the cradle of human evolution, but if Little Foot is really as old as tests suggest, then South Africa may deserve a more prominent point in the timeline.

Following Little Foot’s public debut, the team that’s been studying her plans to release a number of papers exploring the many questions her discovery raises.